Around one in five academy trusts paid their top earners more than £150,000 in pay and pension contributions, newly published accounts show.
The number of trusts paying high-level packages increased from 473 trusts (17 per cent) in 2019-20 to 563 (21.1 per cent) in the most recent set of figures for 2020-21.
And the proportion of trusts paying a six-figure pay and pension package of between £100,000 and £150,000 has also increased to over two-thirds of trusts (68.8 per cent) from 63.5 per cent.
In the accounts document in which the figures appear, the Department for Education said it continues to reinforce the message to the sector that “there is a need for robust evidence-based processes in setting pay, and to ensure that pay of leadership teams in the sector is transparent, proportionate and justifiable”.
It also added that executive pay based on 2021-22 data is currently under review, to identify outlier levels of leadership pay across similar trusts.
The Education Skills and Funding Agency - which is responsible for overseeing academy finances - has previously written to trusts paying in excess of £150,000 or paying multiple members of staff between £100,000 and £150,000 asking them to explain the salary decisions.
The figures for the number of top-paying academy trusts are markedly higher than the data from three years earlier because the DfE started including pension contributions in its measure for top earners in 2018-19.
In the year before this, when pension contributions were excluded, just four per cent of trusts (146) were recorded as paying more than £150,000 while around a third (988) were paying salaries of between £100,000 and £150,000.
In the accounts, newly published today, the DfE shows that the proportion of trusts in cumulative deficit at the end of the 2020-21 accounting year was just 2.7 per cent, which is down from 4.1 per cent a year earlier.
This equates to 70 trusts overall, of which all but 14 were single-school trusts.
The data, however, was collected before trusts started to face significant financial challenges - with rising energy prices, catering costs and more - towards the end of 2021.
